The Problem of the Plantagenets | G. K. Chesterton on St. Thomas Becket | From "A Short History of England" | Ignatius InsightThe Problem of the Plantagenets | G. K. Chesterton on St. Thomas Becket | From A Short
History of England | Ignatius Insight

It is a point of prestige with what is called the Higher Criticism in all
branches to proclaim that certain popular texts and authorities are
"late", and therefore apparently worthless. Two similar events are
always the same event, and the later alone is even credible. This fanaticism is
often in mere fact mistaken; it ignores the most common coincidences of human
life: and some future critic will probably say that the tale of the Tower of
Babel cannot be older than the Eiffel Tower, because there was certainly a
confusion of tongues at the Paris Exhibition. Most of the mediaeval remains
familiar to the modern reader are necessarily "late", such as Chaucer
or the Robin Hood ballads; but they are none the less, to a wiser criticism,
worthy of attention and even trust. That which lingers after an epoch is
generally that which lived most luxuriantly in it. It is an excellent habit to
read history backwards. It is far wiser for a modern man to read the Middle
Ages backwards from Shakespeare, whom he can judge for himself, and who yet is
crammed with the Middle Ages, than to attempt to read them forwards from
Caedmon, of whom he can know nothing, and of whom even the authorities he must
trust know very little. If this be true of Shakespeare, it is even truer, of
course, of Chaucer. If we really want to know what was strongest in the twelfth
century, it is no bad way to ask what remained of it in the fourteenth. When
the average reader turns to the "Canterbury Tales," which are still
as amusing as Dickens yet as mediaeval as Durham Cathedral, what is the very
first question to be asked? Why, for instance, are they called Canterbury Tales;
and what were the pilgrims doing in the road to Canterbury? They were, of
course, taking part in a popular festival like a modern public holiday, though
perhaps more genial and leisurely. Nor are we, perhaps, prepared to accept it
as a self-evident step in progress that their holidays were derived from
saints, while ours are dictated by bankers.

It is almost necessary to say nowadays that a saint means a very good man. The
notion of an eminence merely moral, consistent with complete stupidity or
unsuccess, is a revolutionary image grown unfamiliar by it very familiarity,
and needing, as do many things of this older society, some almost preposterous
modern parallel to give its original freshness and point. If we entered a
foreign town and found a pillar like the Nelson Column, we should be surprised
to learn the hero on the top of it had been famous for his politeness and
hilarity during a chronic toothache. If a procession came down the street with
a brass band and a hero on a white horse, we should think it odd to be told
that he had been very patient with a half-witted maiden aunt. Yet some such
pantomime impossibility is the only measure of the innovation of the Christian
idea of a popular and recognized saint. It must especially be realized that
while this kind of glory was the highest, it was also in a sense the lowest.
The materials of it were almost the same as those of labour and domesticity: it
did not need the sword or sceptre, but rather the staff or spade. It was the
ambition of poverty. All this must be approximately visualized before we catch
a glimpse of the great effects of the story which lay behind the Canterbury
Pilgrimage.

The first few lines of Chaucer's poem, to say nothing of thousands in the
course of it, make it instantly plain that it was no case of secular revels
still linked by a slight ritual to the name of some forgotten god, as may have
happened in the pagan decline. Chaucer and his friends did think about St.
Thomas, at least more frequently than a clerk at Margate things about St. Lubbock.
They did definitely believe in the bodily cures wrought for them through St.
Thomas, at least as firmly as the most enlightened and progressive modern can
believe in those of Mrs. Eddy. Who was St. Thomas, to whose shrine the whole of
that society is thus seen in the act of moving: and why was he so important? If
there be a streak of sincerity in the claim to teach social and democratic
society, instead of a string of kings and battles, this is the obvious and open
gate by which to approach the figure which disputed England with the first
Plantagenet. A real popular history should think more of his popularity even
than his policy. And unquestionably thousands of ploughmen, carpenters, cooks,
and yeomen, as in the motley crowd of Chaucer, knew a great deal about St.
Thomas why they had never even heard of Becket.

It would be easy to detail what followed the Conquest as the feudal tangle that
it was, till a prince from Anjou repeated the unifying effort of the Conqueror.
It is found equally easy to write of the Red King's hunting instead of his
building, which has lasted longer, and which he probably loved much more. It is
easy to catalogue the questions he disputed with Anselm-- leaving out the
question Anselm cared most about, and which he asked with explosive simplicity,
as "Why was God a man?" All this is as simple as saying that a king
died of eating lampreys, from which, however, there is little to learn
nowadays, unless it be that when a modern monarch perishes of gluttony the
newspapers seldom say so. But if we want to know what really happened to
England in this dim epoch, I think it can be dimly but truly traced in the
story of St. Thomas of Canterbury.

Henry of Anjou, who brought fresh French blood into the monarchy, brought also
a refreshment of the idea for which the French have always stood: the idea in
the Roman Law of something impersonal and omnipresent. It is the thing we smile
at even in a small French detective story; when Justice opens a hand bag or
Justice runs after a cab. Henry II really produced this impression of being a
police force in person; a contemporary priest compared his restless vigilance
to the bird and the fish of scripture whose way no man knoweth. Kinghood,
however, meant law and not caprice; its ideal at least was a justice cheap and
obvious as daylight, an atmosphere which lingers only in popular phrases about
the King's English or the King's highway. But though it tended to be
egalitarian it did not, of itself, tend to be humanitarian. In modern France,
as in ancient Rome, the other name of Justice has sometimes been Terror. The
Frenchman especially is always a Revolutionist--and never an Anarchist. Now
this effort of kings like Henry II to rebuild on a plan like that of the Roman
Law was not only, of course, crossed and entangled by countless feudal fancies
and feelings in themselves as well as others, it was also conditioned by what
was the corner-stone of the whole civilization. It had to happen not only with
but within the Church. For a Church was to these men rather a world they lived
in than a building to which they went. Without the Church the Middle Ages would
have had no law, as without the Church the Reformation would have had no Bible.
Many priests expounded and embellished the Roman Law, and many priests supported
Henry II. And yet there was another element in the Church, stored in its first
foundations like dynamite, and destined in every age to destroy and renew the
world. An idealism akin to impossibilism ran down the ages parallel to all its
political compromises. Monasticism itself was the throwing off of innumerable
Utopias, without posterity yet with perpetuity. It had, as was proved
recurrently after corrupt epochs, a strange secret of getting poor quickly; a
mushroom magnificence of destitution. This wind of revolution in the crusading
time caught Francis in Assisi and stripped him of his rich garments in the
street. The same wind of revolution suddenly smote Thomas Becket, King Henry's
brilliant and luxurious Chancellor, and drove him on to an unearthly glory and
bloody end.

Becket was a type of those historic times in which it is really very practical
to be impracticable. The quarrel which tore him from his friend's side cannot
be appreciated in the light of those legal and constitutional debates which the
misfortunes of the seventeenth century have made so much of in more recent
history. To convict St. Thomas of illegality and clerical intrigue, when he set
the law of the Church against that of the State, is about as adequate as to
convict St. Francis of bad heraldry when he said he was the brother of the sun
and the moon. There may have been heralds stupid enough to say so even in that
much more logical age, but it is no sufficient way of dealing with visions or
with revolutions. St. Thomas of Canterbury was a great visionary and a great
revolutionist, but so far as England was concerned his revolution failed and
his vision was not fulfilled. We are therefore told in the text-books little
more than that he wrangled with the King about certain regulations; the most
crucial being whether "criminous clerks" should be punished by the
State or the Church. And this was indeed the chief text of the dispute; but to
realise it we must reiterate what is hardest for modern England to understand--
the nature of the Catholic Church when it was itself a government, and the
permanent sense in which it was itself a revolution.

It is always the first fact that escapes notice; and the first fact about the
Church was that it created a machinery of pardon, where the State could only
work with a machinery of punishment. It claimed to be a divine detective who
helped the criminal to escape by a plea of guilty. It was, therefore, in the
very nature of the institution, that when it did punish materially it punished
more lightly. If any modern man were put back in the Becket quarrel, his
sympathies would certainly be torn in two; for the King's scheme was the more
rational, the Archbishop's was the more humane. And despite the horrors that
darkened religious disputes long afterwards, this character was certainly in
the bulk the historic character of Church government. It is admitted, for
instance, that things like eviction, or the harsh treatment of tenants, were
practically unknown wherever the Church was landlord. The principle lingered
into more evil days in the form by which the Church authorities handed over
culprits to the secular arm to be killed, even for religious offences. In
modern romances this is treated as a mere hypocrisy; but the man who treats
every human inconsistency as a hypocrisy is himself a hypocrite about his own
inconsistencies.

Our world, then, cannot understand St. Thomas, any more than St. Francis,
without accepting very simply a flaming and even fantastic charity, by which
the great Archbishop undoubtedly stands for the victims of this world, where
the wheel of fortune grinds the faces of the poor. He may well have been too
idealistic; he wished to protect the Church as a sort of earthly paradise, of
which the rules might seem to him as paternal as those of heaven, but might
well seem to the King as capricious as those of fairyland. But if the priest
was too idealistic, the King was really too practical; it is intrinsically true
to say he was too practical to succeed in practice. There re-enters here, and
runs, I think, through all English history, the rather indescribable truth I
have suggested about the Conqueror; that perhaps he was hardly impersonal
enough for a pure despot. The real moral of our mediaeval story is, I think,
subtly contrary to Carlyle's vision of a stormy strong man to hammer and weld
the state like a smith. Our strong men were too strong for us, and too strong
for themselves. They were too strong for their own aim of a just and equal
monarchy. The smith broke upon the anvil the sword of state that he was
hammering for himself. Whether or no this will serve as a key to the very
complicated story of our kings and barons, it is the exact posture of Henry II
to his rival. He became lawless out of sheer love of law. He also stood, though
in a colder and more remote manner, for the whole people against feudal
oppression; and if his policy had succeeded in its purity, it would at least
have made impossible the privilege and capitalism of later times. But that
bodily restlessness which stamped and spurned the furniture was a symbol of
him; it was some such things that prevented him and his heirs from sitting as
quietly on their throne as the heirs of St. Louis. He thrust again at the tough
intangibility of the priests' Utopianism like a man fighting a ghost; he
answered transcendental defiances with baser material persecutions; and at
last, on a dark and, I think, decisive day in English history, his word sent
four feudal murderers into the cloisters of Canterbury, who went there to
destroy a traitor and who created a saint.

At the grave of the dead man broke forth what can only be called an epidemic of
healing. For miracles so narrated there is the same evidence as for half of the
facts of history; and any one denying them must deny them upon a dogma. But
something followed which would seem to modern civilization even more monstrous
than a miracle. If the reader can imagine Mr. Cecil Rhodes submitting to be
horsewhipped by a Boer in St. Paul's Cathedral, as an apology for some
indefensible death incidental to the Jameson Raid, he will form but a faint
idea of what was meant when Henry II was beaten by monks at the tomb of his
vassal and enemy. The modern parallel called up is comic, but the truth is that
mediaeval actualities have a violence that does seem comic to our conventions.
The Catholics of that age were driven by two dominant thoughts: the
all-importance of penitence as an answer to sin, and the all-importance of
vivid and evident external acts as a proof of penitence. Extravagant humiliation
after extravagant pride for them restored the balance of sanity. The point is
worth stressing, because without it moderns make neither head nor tail of the
period. Green gravely suggests, for instance, of Henry's ancestor Fulk of
Anjou, that his tyrannies and frauds were further blackened by "low
superstition," which led him to be dragged in a halter round a shrine,
scourged and screaming for the mercy of God. Mediaevals would simply have said
that such a man might well scream for it, but his scream was the only logical
comment he could make. But they would have quite refused to see why the scream
should be added to the sins and not subtracted from them. They would have
thought it simply muddle-headed to have the same horror at a man being horribly
sinful and for being horribly sorry.

But it may be suggested, I think, though with the doubt proper to ignorance,
that the Angevin ideal of the King's Justice lost more by the death of St.
Thomas than was instantly apparent in the horror of Christendom, the canonization
of the victim and the public penance of the tyrant. These things indeed were in
a sense temporary; the King recovered the power to judge clerics, and many
later kings and justiciars continued the monarchical plan. But I would suggest,
as a possible clue to puzzling after events, that here and by this murderous
stroke the crown lost what should have been the silent and massive support of
its whole policy. I mean that it lost the people.

It need not be repeated that the case for despotism is democratic. As a rule
its cruelty to the strong is kindness to the weak. An autocrat cannot be judged
as a historical character by his relations with other historical characters.
His true applause comes not from the few actors on the lighted stage of
aristocracy, but from that enormous audience which must always sit in darkness
throughout the drama. The king who helps numberless helps nameless men, and
when he flings his widest largesse he is a Christian doing good by stealth.
This sort of monarchy was certainly a mediaeval ideal, nor need it necessarily
fail as a reality. French kings were never so merciful to the people as when
they were merciless to the peers; and it is probably true that a Czar who was a
great lord to his intimates was often a little father in innumerable homes. It
is overwhelmingly probable that such a central power, though it might at last
have deserved destruction in England as in France have prevented the few from
seizing and holding all the wealth and power to this day. But in England it broke
off short, through something of which the slaying of St. Thomas may well have
been the supreme example. It was something overstrained and startling and
against the instincts of the people. And of what was meant in the Middle Ages
by the very powerful and rather peculiar thing, the people, I shall speak in
the next chapter.

In any case this conjecture finds support in the ensuing events. It is not
merely that, just as the great but personal plan of the Conqueror collapsed
after all into the chaos of the Stephen transition, so the great but personal
plan of the first Plantagenet collapsed into the chaos of the Barons' Wars.
When all allowance is made for constitutional fictions and afterthoughts, it
does seem likely that here for the first time some moral strength deserted the
monarchy. The character of Henry's second son John (for Richard belongs rather
to the last chapter) stamped it with something accidental yet symbolic. It was
not that John was a mere black blot on the pure gold of the Plantagenets, the
texture was much more mixed and continuous; but he really was a discredited
Plantagenet, and as it were a damaged Plantagenet. It was not that he was much
more of a bad man than many opposed to him, but he was the kind of bad man whom
bad men and good do combine to oppose. In a sense subtler than that of the
legal and parliamentary logic-chopping invented long afterwards, he certainly
managed to put the Crown in the wrong. Nobody suggested that the barons of
Stephen's time starved men in dungeons to promote political liberty, or hung
them up by the heels as a symbolic request for a free parliament. In the reign
of John and his son it was still the barons, and not in the least the people,
who seized the power; but there did begin to appear a case for their seizing
it, for contemporaries as well as constitutional historians afterwards. John,
in one of his diplomatic doublings, had put England into the papal care, as an
estate is put in Chancery. And unluckily the Pope, whose counsels had generally
been mild and liberal, was then in his death-grapple with the Germanic Emperor
and wanted every penny he could get to win. His winning was a blessing to
Europe, but a curse to England, for he used the island as a mere treasury for
this foreign war. In this and other matters the baronial party began to have
something like a principle, which is the backbone of a policy. Much
conventional history that connects their councils with a thing like our House
of Commons is as far-fetched as it would be to say that the Speaker wields a
Mace like those which the barons brandished in battle. Simon de Montfort was
not an enthusiast for the Whig theory of the British Constitution, but he was
an enthusiast for something. He founded a parliament in a fit of considerable
absence of mind, in the responsible and even religious sense which had made his
father so savage a Crusader against heretics, that he laid about him with his
great sword before he fell at Evesham.

Magna Carta was not a step towards democracy, but it was a step away from
despotism. If we hold that double truth firmly, we have something like a key to
the rest of English history. A rather loose aristocracy not only gained but
often deserved the name of liberty. And the history of the English can be most
briefly summarized by taking the French motto of "Liberty, Equality, and
Fraternity," and noting that the English have sincerely loved the first
and lost the other two.

In the contemporary complication much could be urged both for the Crown and the
new and more national rally of the nobility. But it was a complication, whereas
a miracle is a plain matter that any man can understand. The possibilities or
impossibilities of St. Thomas Becket were left a riddle for history; the white
flame of his audacious theory was frustrated, and his work cut short like a
fairy tale left untold. But his memory passed into the care of the common
people, and with them he was more active dead than alive--yes, even more busy.
In the next chapter we shall consider what was meant in the Middle Ages by the
common people, and how uncommon we should think it to-day. And in the last
chapter we have already seen how in the Crusading age the strangest things grew
homily, and men fed on traveller's tales when there were no national
newspapers. A many-coloured pageant of martyrology on numberless walls and
windows had familiarized the most ignorant with alien cruelties in many climes;
with a bishop flayed by Danes or a virgin burned by Saracens, with one saint
stoned by Jews and another hewn in pieces by negroes. I cannot think it was a
small matter that among these images one of the most magnificent had met his
death but lately at the hands of an English monarch. There was at least
something akin to the primitive and epical romances of that period in the tale
of those two mighty friends, one of whom struck too hard and slew the other. It
may even have been so early as this that something was judged in silence; and
for the multitude rested on the Crown a mysterious seal of insecurity like that
of Cain, and of exile on the English kings.

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